Business Challenge of the Week – What would you do?

It’s a new month which means it is time to focus on a new area of your business. So far we have covered:

January – Strategy

February – Money

March – Marketing

April – Sales

May is about providing you with challenges around building and maintaining a winning team for your organization. Remember you are only as good as the people you surround yourself with so the challenges this month will help you surround yourself with “A” Players.

Your challenge this week is adapted from Guy Kawasaki’s “Art of Recruiting”. He calls it the Shopping Center Test but my version is called the Concert Test. He uses it during the recruiting process but I’m adapting it to use for all of your key team members.

Ready? It’s really quick and really easy to do. But the results are very revealing.

Take a moment to list you key team members – those people whose roles are vital to your success. I want you to write them down on a piece of paper.

Now go through this for each team member one by one:

Suppose you’re at a concert, and you see your team member.

He/she is fifty feet away and has not seen you.

You have three choices:

beeline it over to him and say hello;

say to yourself, “If we make eye contact then I’ll say hello, or maybe they will see me and come over, if not, that’s okay too;”

make a point to not look in that direction again and go the opposite direction when you leave.

If you don’t pick number 1 for each person on your team, than you’ve got a problem that you need to address. It may not be that the person isn’t right for the team, but clearly there is an issue with that person if you will not make a simple effort to connect outside the office when the opportunity arises. My advice is figure out what it is and deal with it immediately. How you deal with it may need to be extreme too – maybe they need to be let go and you just don’t want to deal with it. This is an all too common problem.

Hopefully as you think about each team member on the list, you will choose #1 each time. If you don’t, then deal with it; don’t just rationalize it somehow. Resolution may not be easy, but forthrightly addressing the issue, and ensuring that you’ve got the correct players in place will be significant to the future success of your organization.

Remember, without people a company just an empty building. Make sure you’ve got the right ones in place.

BONUS CHALLENGE: Do this same exercise for your customers as well. It may be time to get rid of some of your customers.